This invention relates generally to medical imaging systems, and more particularly, to providing a noise based control over the scanning time in medical imaging systems.
Some conventional positron emission tomography (PET) systems use a predetermined or fixed amount of time to acquire a scan. Other conventional PET systems determine the scan time based on the amount of activity detected. The activity detected in PET systems corresponds to the number of gamma rays detected by the PET scanners. Both the above mentioned methods, however, may not be able to predict the quality of the images. Therefore, in order to acquire an image of specific quality, an estimate of the amount of time or activity may be needed.
The time for acquiring a scan may be dependent on the desired image quality of the scan. To acquire an image of better quality, a larger scan time may be required. However, productivity may suffer due to large scan times. Furthermore, more time may be spent in scanning than necessary, in order to get an image of a specific quality. If the scan time is reduced to improve productivity, the image quality may get adversely affected. Therefore, the selection of the scan time may have to be a trade off between image quality and productivity.
PET systems need to optimize the scan time in order to get an image of predicted quality without adversely affecting the productivity.